


Live If You Try

by PR Zed (przed)



Category: Take That (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Boy Band in Space!, F/M, M/M, Space Opera
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-25
Updated: 2019-08-25
Packaged: 2020-09-26 10:10:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,450
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20388019
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/przed/pseuds/PR%20Zed
Summary: When Mark follows a gorgeous dark-haired boy into the Commonwealth Space Service, he's looking for adventure.  He doesn't realize the fate of humanity is on his shoulders.





	Live If You Try

**Author's Note:**

> This bit of madness started a few years ago when someone on a Take That forum mentioned they fancied a TT space opera AU. I thought "I can do that" and wrote the first couple of scenes, but then got distracted by a shiny new fandom (*cough* Marvel *cough*) and stuck it in a drawer. But seeing the Odyssey tour this year rekindled my TT love, and I thought I'd finally finish it.

I'd just finished my shift when I noticed them, four boys sitting behind a table in the station's market hall, a "Join the Commonwealth Space Service" banner fluttering over their heads.

I'd known the ship had come in. I was only 17, still an apprentice with Oldham Station's dock master, but I handled all the paperwork when a ship arrived at our little piece of the Commonwealth. The CSS Lancer wasn't much to look at, but then Oldham wasn't much of a space station. 

It seemed like it was enough of a station to attract Service recruiters, though.

I stopped, and stood looking at the four of them, wanting to approach them, even as I was picturing my mum's reaction to me talking to a Service recruiter. "You're too young," she'd say. "It's too dangerous," she'd say. "I'll miss you." Well, she'd never say that last bit, not out loud. But I'd know that's what she meant.

But joining the Service…I'd had dreams of that when I was at school. Fantasies of becoming a scientist on an Explorer-class ship, of finding an Earth-like planet, a new home for all the people in the Commonwealth. Maybe even for all of humanity.

I took a hesitant step toward the table, and then another. One of the boys nudged another one and nodded in my direction. They were both standing by the time I reached the table, one dark-haired, one blond, both smiling.

"Hello," the blond said, pumping my hand in a way that marked him as not of the station. A reserved lot, the people of Oldham. Not given to displays of any sort of emotion or enthusiasm. "Are you interested in joining the service?"

"You don't start out with that, Gaz," said to the dark-haired boy. "You'll scare them off, won't you?" He looked at me. "Won't he?"

"I'm not that easily scared off," I said, then looked closely at this stranger. And promptly felt like I'd been caught in an airlock without a spacesuit, all the oxygen sucked out of my lungs.

He was gorgeous. Taller than me, with a dusting of faint freckles across his nose and wicked green eyes. When he took my hand and shook it, much more gently than Gaz had, I could feel myself get light-headed. Especially when he didn't let go of my hand.

"You're lucky, Gaz. He's not easily scared off."

"Yeah, I heard 'im, Rob."

Rob. The beautiful boy's name was Rob. And he was holding my hand.

"What's your name?" Gaz asked.

"M..M" I swallowed, and tried again. "Mark," I managed to squeak out.

"That's a nice name," Rob said, and then I really did think I was going to pass out. I was rescued by the other two boys at the table. Though now that I was closer, I could see they weren't boys, exactly. Not like me and Rob. They were young men.

"Why don't you offer Mark a chair, Rob?" said one of them, tall and skinny with kind blue eyes framed by the longest lashes I'd ever seen on a man.

"I was about to, Jay."

Rob finally released my hand and hustled a chair up for me. I sat down gratefully, then took a cup of tea handed to me by the fourth member of their team. 

"I'm Howard," he said. "Don't mind the rest of these numpties. They mean well, but they're not very bright."

"Oi!" Rob said, even as Jay chuckled and Gaz looked vaguely outraged. I couldn't help but laugh. I liked them. I liked them all. Even Gaz, with his outsized personality. And especially Rob who was looking at me with a big, contagious grin. 

"_Do_ you want to join the Service?" Rob asked.

"I thought you told me not to start out with that!" Gaz protested.

"I'm not starting out, am I?" Rob said to Gaz before turning to me. "So, do you?"

"Yeah," I said, catching myself by surprise, and yet somehow not surprised at all. "Yeah, I really do."

I talked to them all for an hour, Rob and Gary and Jason and Howard. Turns out they were new recruits themselves, had all signed on when the Lancer had visited New Manchester Station.

"There are more recruits, on board," Jason told me. "It's just our turn to sit at the booth."

Gary had been one of the first to sign up on New Manchester. He was originally from Frodsham Station in the local asteroid mining belt, but he'd headed for the bigger station when he'd heard CSS recruiters were on the way.

"I've always wanted to be a ship's captain," he told me, his expression earnest.

"Yeah, yeah, Captain Barlow," Rob said, rolling his eyes, but I could see even he had a grudging respect for Gaz.

Jason and Howard weren't as green as the rest of us. They'd been freighter crew out of New Manchester, and had decided to join the Service together. The two of them had stories of dancing in zero G clubs on distant stations, and visiting asteroid mining comms that never saw a sun from one year to the next. They'd even seen Old Earth with their own eyes.

"You could still see the impact crater from orbit," Jason said, and Howard leaned into him, both their expressions serious. "It takes up most of a continent; put a bloody great crack in the planet's crust."

"And there's a volcano." Howard took up the story. "A big bastard of a thing. You could see the fire and ash of it from space. Was 'orrible."

"Did you land?" I asked, my eyes wide.

"No, we just made our delivery to Lunar Base and were gone. No one lands on Old Earth," Jason said, shaking his head. "The whole planet is too unstable, even now. I don't know how anyone escaped from it."

And that made me think of the stories my own family had passed down the centuries and generations, about the people who'd made it to the escape rockets and the ones who hadn't.

Then there was Rob.

He was younger than me. Swore he was 16, the youngest the Service would take, but I half thought he might be lying about that. His green eyes that flashed of mischief and fun, and he had broad shoulders on a still scrawny frame. He was going to be taller than Howard when he was done growing. 

The more I talked to Rob, the more I wanted to be his friend. To be more than his friend, if I was honest with myself. And if that meant joining the service, then I would join the service.

I signed the papers, then and there, shook all of their hands, and then walked to our quarters to break the news to my family.

As predicted, Mum argued against me joining up, and then cried. Dad asked me to think of Mum, but I could see something in his eyes that told me that maybe he regretted never doing anything quite so bold when he was younger. My brother and sister, though, they practically packed my bag and carried me down to the ship. I think Tracy just wanted my sleeping niche in our quarters, and Daniel wanted to be able to say his big brother was in the Service, but I didn't care. I took their encouragement, packed my duffle with my few belongings, hugged my brother and sister, shook my dad’s hand, and went down to the space dock with my mum clutching my elbow.

Rob was waiting for me outside of the CSS Lancer. He gave my mum a friendly smile, and me a welcome surprise.

"I asked Nige—that's our captain, Captain Nigel Martin-Smith, bit of a prat but we won't be with him forever—if you could bunk with me. And he agreed!"

And just like that, I was in the Commonwealth Space Service, with a ship and crewmates and the chance to explore the stars beyond Oldham.

As the days and weeks passed, I got to know my new friends more and more. Especially Rob.

Rob loved to take the mickey. Much as I admired Gary, I couldn't help but giggle when Rob wound him up. And I couldn't help but feel pleased that Rob seemed as fond of me as I was of him. He threw his arm around me after Mum had seen me off at the space dock and whispered in my ear, "My mum didn't want me to join up, either. But just you watch. We'll have such fun."

And we did have fun. All of us. Though not all the time.

The physical training wasn't fun. Not at all. There was running in the ship's gravity ring, and press-ups and sit-ups. Resistance work with elastic tubes and each other in the lower-grav parts of the ship. All of it meant to strengthen bodies that had grown up on stations, not planets.

"If you want to walk on a planet, you'll need the muscles for it," the captain (Captain Martin-Smith in public; fuckin’ Nige when we were alone, by ourselves, with no chance that fuckin' Nige would overhear us) told us, even as he had us do twenty more press-ups in near-Earth gravity, and then twenty more again. "You don't want your bones snapping the first time you take a step. Or to be exhausted after you've gone half a kilometre."

"C'mon, sir," Rob whined as he sprawled on the floor, sweaty and exhausted. "Give us a break."

"Gravity won't give you a break, and neither will I. Twenty more press-ups, boys and girls. Courtesy of Mr Williams."

We all groaned, and Jay gave Rob a cosh ‘round the head because he was closest to him, and then we did twenty more press ups. Because we'd all long since learned you didn't ignore an order from Captain Nigel Martin-Smith.

Besides the exercise, there was other training to be done. We were divided into groups, and members of the crew took us through how to run every part of the ship: communications, engineering, recycling systems, greenhouses, the lot.

"What if your engineer dies and your star drive goes tits up when you're two light years away from the nearest station?" Martin-Smith would ask us if anyone complained about how much we had to learn. "Or if your oxygen plant breaks down? Everyone has to do their part. Everyone has to pull their weight."

"I don't know about pulling my weight," Rob said that night in the double bunk sleeping niche we shared. "But there's someone I wouldn't mind pulling on this ship."

"Who?" I asked, wide-eyed and curious, wondering which girl or boy had caught Rob's fancy.

"You, you berk!" Rob said with a grin. And then he leaned in and kissed me.

Until then, I hadn't dared think about fancying Rob, not really. But after that kiss…well, I knew it was more than a schoolboy crush. We were more inseparable than ever after that.

After a few months of learning all the ship’s systems, everyone started to figure out where their talents and interests lay. Jason ended up apprenticing with the navigator. Howard landed in engineering. Gary was taken on by Captain Fuckin’ Nige himself, working toward a command position, and because Rob couldn't help being a competitive idiot, he followed him into the command stream.

And me? I loved the greenhouses and ended up under the wings of the botanists who manned them. I loved learning about how to grow the food that kept us all alive, and how the ecosystem of a new planet could be adapted for the people who would live on it. Rob complained that I always had earth under my fingernails and pollen in my hair, but I didn’t care. I love the loamy smell of the greenhouses almost as much as I loved him.

* * *

Even with its star drive, it still took the Lancer six months to get to the centre of the Commonwealth. Six months of hard training and back-breaking work and nights sharing a bunk with Rob. 

"Leave off, you two, can't you?" Howard begged one evening when we must have been especially loud in our bunk. There was even less privacy on the Lancer than there'd been on Oldham Station, and after a while you stopped caring about what your crewmates could hear.

"We've said nowt about you and Jay," Rob shot back.

"We're a bit more discreet than you two."

"You'd like to think that."

"Anyone is more discreet than you," Jason waded into the debate.

"Shut up, all of you!" Gary finally roared. "Some of us are trying to sleep." And then we all dissolved into laughter, even Gaz.

It wasn't long after that that Gaz started seeing Dawn, a shy slip of a girl who worked on the botany team with me, and liked the greenhouses nearly as much as I did. After that, the rest of us started teasing _them_ about being quiet.

* * *

Our arrival at the space dock of New London Station was a bit of a shock.

I'd grown up on a station. Oldham was a real station, not a rock in the middle of a bloody asteroid field. I thought I knew what to expect. But New London was…magical. As we approached it, it glowed in the darkness like a decoration made of spun glass, and I could see small dots hovering in orbit around it. As we drew closer, those dots grew into ships. Big ones. Star ships and colony ships and Explorer-class vessels, all ten times the size of our little rust bucket, and every last one of them looked like a tiny insect beside the vastness of New London.

Martin-Smith let all of us recruits into the viewing lounge to watch the approach to the station, and I'm still not sure whether he did it to be kind or to make us feel like we were insignificant. That was Fuckin’ Nige all over. He never gave a compliment he couldn't turn into a criticism, though that day I was feeling charitable toward him. He belonged to our past. Our futures rested on one of the ships we manoeuvred around before docking with the station.

We were given three days leave at New London while the Service decided what to do with us. Three days to explore the wonders of the greatest station in the Commonwealth, and we did it together: the six of us.

At the end of three days, we were told to meet in the Great Assembly Square at the heart of the station. And it wasn’t just the crew of the Lancer there, but people from all the other recruitment ships that had mustered at the station. Hundreds of us, thousands, even, all gathered together for a grand announcement.

We thought we were there for our final ship assignments, and we were all a bit nervous about that. You could request to be assigned with one other person, whether a romantic partner or best friend. Rob and I had signed a joint assignment request, as had Howard and Jason, and Gary and Dawn, but we also were hoping our little group would be kept together. As we waited together in the Square, Rob held my hand and the worst thing we could anticipate was not being on the same ship as our mates.

It was fifteen minutes after the designated time when Admiral Margaret Moseki took the stage. She was from Gaborone, one of the stations that claimed membership in both the Commonwealth and the African Confederacy, and she was legendary both in and out of the CSS. I’d seen her before, in newsfeeds on Oldham and in the weekly Commonwealth broadcasts we watched on the Lancer, but I’d never dreamed I’d see her in person. She was even more regal than she’d come across on staticky holo feeds, and everyone in the Square went silent as she looked out at our numbers.

She gripped the podium in front of her, took a deep, measured breath, and began to tell us all a story.

At the beginning, it was a story we all knew, about the shattering of Old Earth by a planet-killing asteroid. About the scattering of humanity to space stations and asteroid belts in the solar system and beyond. About the quest to find a new planet for humanity. About the bravery of the explorers of the CSS and all of the other Space Confederacies.

But then she started telling us more. Telling us about thing that had been hidden from us. The stations lost to asteroid storms and stellar flares and airlock breaches. The escalating harmful genetic mutations that had developed from people living in hostile environments never meant to harbour life. The failure of the Explorer ships to find a new planetary home that was needed more and more each day.

"Humanity is hovering on the edge of extinction," she said, and I could hear the collective gasp of everyone around me, could feel it in my throat. Rob squeezed my tightly. I squeezed back as everyone around us waited for the Admiral's next words.

"You are our last hope," she said, and then she explained why we were all assembled here, why the CSS had collected such an unprecedented number of recruits in the last year, why we'd all been submitted to such hard training on the way to New London Station.

We were to crew a new generation of starships, the Discovery class, ships that dwarfed even the huge Explorer ships I'd seen when we docked at the station.

Every one of the Space Confederacies had gathered all their recruits on this day, and every one of them was making a similar announcement.

"Your mission, your duty, is to find us a new home in the stars, a planet that will be a safe haven for your crewmates, for your families, for all of humankind."

She looked out at us all, and her expression somehow managed to be both solemn and hopeful.

"I know you will do us proud," said the Admiral, and in that moment I would have done anything for her.

I heard the ping of comm transmissions echoing in the hall. Everyone one of us bent over to check our wrist displays. I tapped mine, and a heads-up message appeared with my ship assignment: Junior Botanist on the CSS Trafalgar.

As a tumult of voices rose up around me, Rob peeked over my shoulder at my assignment hovering in the air.

"The Trafalgar," Rob shouted into my ear. "We're both on the Trafalgar!"

* * *

As it turned out, we were all assigned to the Trafalgar: me and Rob, Jason and Howard, Gary and Dawn. We'd all be together, and together I knew there was nothing that could stop us from finding humanity the home we desperately needed.

Like all the big CSS ships, the Trafalgar had communal living pods, with sleeping niches organized around a central cooking and living area. You could apply to be housed with friends, so we all submitted our paperwork to live together almost as soon as our crew assignments were delivered.

"I don't know about living with you lot for a few more years," Gary complained as he flicked the virtual button that would send off his housing request.

"Better the devils you know," Dawn told him, aiming an elbow at his side, and a wink at the rest of us. I'd liked Dawn from the moment I met her, and that made me like her even more.

There were a few days of scrambling, as all the new recruits and old hands moved their belongings from old ships to new. I made a few trips with Rob to New London's markets for things we thought we'd need and couldn't be had in the deep of space. Mostly gear, but I couldn't resist one jacket I found in a second-hand store. It was made of a patchwork of brocade fabrics of all different colours, with epaulets and frog fasteners in satiny gold braid.

"What do you think?" I asked Rob when I tried it on, preening in front of him.

"It's perfect," he said with a laugh, then dropped an impulsive kiss on my lips that made me tingle.

It was such a rush, preparing for departure, that it was almost a surprise when it was finally the day for the launch. Jason was on the bridge, having been chosen for the team to pilot the great ship away from New London's dock, but the rest of us gathered on the assembly deck, watching as the light of the station drifted away, smaller and smaller until it was just one pin prick of brightness in a sea of stars.

When Jason's voice came over the ships announcement system, delivering the countdown to star drive ignition, we all held hands, and then hugged and cried with the rest of the crew as we flew into the unknown.

The first few months on the Trafalgar were a dream.

I was busy learning my trade, and my guv'nor, Josie Rourke, Trafalgar's head of Botany, was that rare combination of kind and tough. Dawn and I had both ended up in Botany, and Josie always pushed us to do our best. She mentored Dawn when she showed a talent for developing new crops to feed the crew, and encouraged my work on Old Earth's trees, looking for ways to increase oxygen production in the tree canopy and stop soil erosion.

At the same time, I was learning how to live with Rob, and falling in love with him more each day. 

He'd come back from a shift with the command team, wanting to share everything he'd learned and done, hanging over my shoulder as I took my turn cooking for our little family. (After a few weeks of everyone doing kitchen duty, it had been decided that Jason, Gaz and I were the only ones capable of making food that wasn't underdone or burned, and we happily took on the job making meals, while the others set the table or cleaned up afterwards.) And after, we'd slip into our sleeping niche and wrap up around each other so tightly I wasn’t sure where I ended and Rob began.

One thing none of us enjoyed was the physical training. If our goal was to find a planet, it was more important than ever that we'd be able to handle the gravity of a planet. I'd thought Fuckin' Nige had been bad, but Captain Gavin enforced a strict training regime for all crew. It was horrible, but it meant we were all fit and strong and ready for anything. 

And the Captain wasn't all discipline. Faced with a crew full of young people, he also made sure we there was enough rec time for everyone. I joined the low-grav football league, and led the science team to a victory against Rob's command team. Howard took the music he was always fiddling around with and ran pop-up dance clubs in weird spaces around the ship. He talked me into letting him run one in the greenhouses once, and watching Rob and Jay dance among all that green was worth the bollocking Josie gave me afterwards.

I don't think I'd ever been happier.

The thing about that kind of happiness, though, is that it can't last.

Gaz and Rob began bringing back news from the command team, stories of more stations damaged or destroyed, of other Discovery ships limping back from their missions or lost entirely. It was sobering, and made us realize all over again how fragile we were, several thousand humans protected from the dangers of space by a few thin layers of metal.

We were almost a year out when the bad news became very personal.

I was partway through a shift in the greenhouse, transplanting new seedlings that would be our next food crop, when my comms unit chirped with a message from Rob. 

Three words: "GET HOME NOW."

Three words, but I knew they couldn't mean anything good.

I didn't even ask Josie for permission to leave, just dropped my trowel and ran through the ship's corridors, my nailbeds black with garden dirt. I reached our quarters and hesitated on the threshold, my hand hovering over the door opening control, uncertain of what I'd find inside.

When I finally hit the control, what I did find inside was worse than I'd imagined. 

Gary was collapsed on the floor, weeping, as Dawn held him, stroking his back, his hair, his face, murmuring words of comfort. Around them, Howard and Jason and Rob stood in a circle, their faces locked in expressions of horror and shock.

I moved over to Rob, took hold of his arm.

"Frodshom's gone," he said, not even waiting for me to ask what had happened. "Catastrophic airlock failure," he added.

"Any survivors?" I asked, hoping against hope that Gaz's family, at least _one_ of them, had made it to a rescue pod. 

"Not many," Rob replied. "Not any of the Barlows," he whispered in my ear.

"Fuck," I said, and clutched Rob hard, thinking how I'd feel if it was Oldham Station that had been destroyed, if it was my parents and sister and brother who'd been taken from me.

Gary was never the same.

He was still determined as ever to become a captain, but if you looked, you could see the grief in the centre of him. He held his shoulders a bit more stiffly, and his smile became a rare thing, shared only when one of us surprised him into laughter with a well-timed joke.

It wasn't only Gaz who'd been changed by the loss of his home. The destruction of Frodshom energized all of our little group, making us more determined than ever to find a new home for humanity.

Howard worked with the team designing more powerful scanners to find new planets that might support human life. Rob became almost as serious as Gaz when it came to his command duties. Jay became the best navigator on the ship, adept at finding the best routes to the most promising solar systems. Dawn worked on creating better crops for farming on a planet's surface. And me, I worked with Josie on developing trees that would help with terraforming any planet we found.

We did find planets, but none that were suitable. Some were too close to their suns; some were too far away. Some had no water; some had water laced with molecules that would kill. Some had no atmosphere at all; some had an atmosphere of acid and poison.

But then we found the ghost tree planet. Or rather, Howard did.

He was testing his team's latest scanner, and pinged a terrestrial planet in its sun's Goldilocks zone—not too hot, not too cold, just right, and with enough water, good old H2O to support life. He reported it to his guv'nor, who took it to Captain Gavin, and before we knew it, Jason was guiding the Trafalgar toward what we hoped would be our new home.

No one called it the ghost tree planet at first. At first, it was only planet HD 40307 D, Earth-like, and the most promising planet we'd found yet. 

I was in the ship's greenhouse when we crossed the system's outer asteroid belt. Rob was off duty and had come to try and convince me to join him on the observation deck as we entered the system.

"C'mon, Markie," Rob begged. "Come with me."

"Leave off, Rob." I shrugged off his arm and went back to my lab bench. "I'm in the middle of an experiment."

"You can leave your tiny trees for a few minutes," he said, rolling his eyes at my little seedlings.

"You laugh, but when these are big they'll make enough oxygen for us all."

"Yeah, yeah," Rob said, making the effort to sound unimpressed, but he leaned in and kissed me anyway.

The HD 40307 system had seven planets, the fourth one, D, being our target. We'd crossed the orbit of the two outer ones when I felt it: an itching feeling in my head, as if there was someone whispering in the room too quietly for me to understand.

"Can you hear that?" I asked Rob.

"What?" He looked at me in confusion.

"That." There was a surge in the whispering as my frustration rose.

"I don't hear anything, Markie." Rob looked concerned. "Nowt but the life support anyway. You sure that's not what it is?"

"I know what life support sounds like," I said, biting back on my irritation. Everyone knew the sound of a functioning life-support system. And we knew what it sounded like when one failed. The lucky ones only knew that from drills, the constant "what to do if your ship or station is breached" training we'd all been doing since we were old enough to go to crèche. "This is something else."

"Are you sure?"

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, concentrating on what I was hearing. Or feeling. The sensation faded to nothing, even as I tried to hang onto it.

I shook my head and shrugged, unsure that I hadn't just been imagining it, whatever _it_ was.

"Don't worry, Markie." Rob gave me a hug and rested his chin on the top of my head. "I'm sure it's nothing."

Jay was on the bridge for the next ten hours, controlling the ship's approach to HD 40307 D, decelerating us until we were in a perfect orbit. You always knew when Jay was on the helm. There were no sudden jolts, no gravitational anomalies when he was steering us.

From orbit, the planet didn't look like much, its surface covered by blue seas broken by three continents. There was no sign of life on the continents, no greens, just an unrelenting tawny-coloured mass. But the science departments had given us hope. The atmospheric physicists were saying the air wasn't breathable yet, but would be if we adjusted the proportion of CO2 to O2. The planetary geologists confirmed what Howard's scanners had shown, that the oceans were pure water, more than enough to sustain every human in the known galaxy. 

We spent two days in orbit while every science department took what readings they could and prepared for their away missions. I helped the rest of my team prepare our away kit, but I hadn't thought we'd go down right away. Botany was usually one of the last teams to go down to a planet, if we got to go at all.

Then we sent drones down to the nearest continent and got the first high-res images of the nearest continent's surface.

There were trees on HD 40307 D.

Not what anyone from Old Earth would have recognized as a tree. These trees rose up hundreds of metres from the tawny-brown surface, their leafless trunks and branches a startling bone white.

"Ghost trees," Dawn muttered under her breath when we got the images in the lab, giving the planet its name.

As soon as she said it, I heard it again, the whispering in my head. This time I didn't tell Rob or anyone else about it. Just shook my head and ignored it and got on with the work.

And there was suddenly loads of work. Botany had been bumped up to the very first shuttle down, and given two spots.

"Can I go?" I asked our guv. I wasn't usually on early away teams, but I had an edge this time. I was the botany team's tree expert, and Josie knew it. And beyond that, I had the feeling that I needed to get down to the planet's surface. Right away. _ Now_.

"You're not going to rest until I let you, are you, Owen?" Josie all but rolled her eyes at me.

"No, guv."

"All right. Andrews, you go with him and keep him out of trouble."

"Yes, guv." I think Dawn worked to keep herself from jumping up and down. At least until Josie was out of the room.

That was how I ended up on the first shuttle down to the ghost tree planet, with Jay piloting the shuttle, Gaz and Rob our command team, and a half dozen other scientists with all of our gear.

The shuttle landed in a shallow valley ringed by the ghost trees. The trees looked even more imposing than they had in the images, surrounding the shuttle like giant sentinels.

As soon as the airlock opened and I set foot on the planet, the itching in my head went from a whispering to a constant chattering, drowning out all other sound, from the talking of my crewmates to the sound of my own breathing filling my helmet.

I walked toward the nearest tree, drawn to it in a way I couldn't understand. Up close, the surface of the tree looked as smooth as the images had from space. It wasn't rough like an Earth tree's bark; it had no blemishes or cracks. It was perfect.

I reached out a hand, hesitated, and then touched the tree.

The chattering in my head exploded into chaos, sound overpowering all my other senses. Sight was sound. Touch was sound. Taste was sound. Everything was sound. 

And then, just as abruptly, everything was nothing.

I woke up on the shuttle, the whispering inaudible against the rumbling of the engines.

Someone had taken off my suit, and there were electrical leads stuck on my chest. Rob was sitting beside me, helmet and gloves off, holding my hand with a grip so tight it hurt. I blinked, and focused on Rob, noticing after a moment that Rob's suit had scorch marks all down his right arm and across his body. I looked up at his face, and noticed the tears streaming down his face.

"Are you all right?" I asked. Or tried to. My voice was so faint I could barely hear myself.

Rob's hand tightened even more on mine.

"You nearly died," he choked out. "You nearly fucking died, Markie. You stupid, fucking bastard."

"I'm sorry," I said, then clenched my eyes tightly shut, not wanting to see Rob's misery. 

The whispering grew louder in my head, and it felt comforting, felt like my mother tucking me into my sleeping niche when I'd been sick as a child.

* * *

We were met on the ship by a medical team, who loaded me onto a stretcher and pushed me to the medical bay. In spite of his protests, they did the same to Rob.

"You've got fucking scorch marks on your fucking suit, mate," said the med tech, a tiny but forceful woman who spoke with the accent of New London's underside. "Of _course_ we're fucking going to take you to medical.

The chief med tech, Dr. Khadri was waiting for us in the medical bay, and we were both prodded and scanned and poked and questioned.

While Rob sat on the treatment bed and watched over me, his legs dangling like a bored schoolboy, I told Dr. Khadri about the whispering, and about the crushing sound that had overwhelmed me on the surface.

"Can you still hear it? This whispering?" She frowned as she looked at me.

I closed my eyes, and there it was, faint but still audible. As I strained to hear what those mysterious voices were saying, their tone seemed to change. 

I opened my eyes and nodded.

"Yeah. But it's different now," I told Dr. Khadri. "They sound…comforting."

Khadri frowned harder.

"Comforting?"

I shrugged. I knew it made no sense, but it felt like those whispering voices in my head were trying to tell me everything would be all right.

"Can I go home?" I asked, because all I wanted to do right then was sleep in my own bunk, with Rob wrapped around me.

"Not quite yet," Dr. Khadri said. She patted my shoulder in exactly the same way my mum would have, if she'd been here. "We want to make sure you're okay. Make sure this whispering isn't as ominous as it seems."

"Can I stay here, with him?" Rob asked, his legs kicking harder against the side of the treatment bed. "I'll look out for him," he continued. "Make sure he doesn't do what he's not supposed to."

Dr. Khadri gave him a sceptical look, as if she knew enough about Rob not to trust him to be the voice of reason, but she finally nodded.

"You can stay. But mind you let him sleep. And you should sleep, too."

"I will!" Rob gave her one of his most innocent looks, all big eyes and tilted head. Khadri didn't look like she was fooled one bit, but she didn't argue with Rob.

"And you," she said, turning to me. "I don't want you, or anyone else, back down on that planet. Not until we figure out what's going on with you, and what this whispering is."

"Yes, ma'am," I said, as earnestly as I could. And at the time, I meant it. I really did.

"Fine," she said, making it clear she didn't trust either one of us one little bit. "Sleep tonight, and I'll be back in the morning for one last exam. If you check out, you can go back to your quarters and light duty."

"Thank you, ma'am," we both said together.

Rob moved over to my bed as soon as Khadri left us, sitting on the edge, lightly clutching my hand, looking at me like I was a fragile piece of equipment that might break if he held it too tightly.

He was still holding my hand, the whispers forming a comforting wall around me, when I fell asleep.

* * *

When I woke up with a start, the lights in the sick bay were low of third shift, Rob was snoring in his own bed, the whispers had become a clamouring in my head, and I finally knew what I had to do.

But it wouldn't be easy. And I couldn't do it alone.

I sat up carefully, waiting for pain that thankfully never came, and then shook Rob awake.

"Markie!" Rob said, loud enough that I put my hand over his mouth.

"Shhh," I said. "Quiet."

"Why should I be quiet?" Rob said when I removed my hand. 

"Because I don't want anyone to notice we're awake, because I need to go down to the planet. Now."

Rob opened his mouth, and I could see the gears turning behind those wicked green eyes, could see him trying to decide what to say: _Are you crazy?_ Or _What do you want to do that for?_ Or maybe _What the actual fuck?_

In the end, he didn't say any of that. Instead, his expression got more serious than I'd ever seen it before.

"Are you sure?" he asked. 

I could tell that he was going to trust whatever answer I gave him absolutely, that I needed to get this right, so I closed my eyes and listened to the voices in my head. I still couldn't understand their language, but when I opened my eyes again I was one hundred per cent certain of what I had to do.

"Yeah," I said. "I really am."

"Okay," he said, that one word full of all the trust he had in me, bless him. Then he leaned in and gave me a kiss that nearly whited out the whispering shouts in my head.

"Dr. Khadri's put an embargo on landing on the planet, so we're going to need some help," he said after he pulled back from that kiss. He stood, and did something to the control panel of the med scanner over my bed. Then he grabbed my hand and started pulling me out of the blessedly deserted sick bay. "C'mon. If we're going to do this, we'd better get going."

We snuck out of the medical bay without anyone noticing—Rob had disabled the scanners that were monitoring my vitals, sending them false signals—and made our way to our quarters. It was one of those rare times where everyone was on the same schedule, so all our friends were there.

Rob woke them up, and I explained what I had to do.

They didn't agree immediately. They asked questions, which I answered as best I could. Yes, I believed the voices were the ghost trees. No, I didn't think they meant us harm. Yes, I really needed to get to the surface.

All the while I was being interrogated by my friends, I could feel the need to get down to the surface _now_ building up inside me until I was practically vibrating with it.

Once I'd answered all their questions, we turned to Gary. _Captain_ Barlow was our leader, and we all knew it. What he decided, we'd all do. I held my breath and waited for his decision, willing him to understand how important this was.

"Yeah, all right," he said. "Let's get Markie down to the planet, shall we?"

I nearly wept with relief.

In short order, Gary came up with a plan, Jason picked it apart until he was sure it would work, and we all slotted into our roles.

Gary went up to the bridge on the pretext of wanting to check a reading he'd noticed the day before. Howard went down to the sensor control array in engineering. The rest of us, me, Rob, Jason and Dawn went down to the shuttle bay and snuck into a small craft. Thankfully, with Khadri's embargo in place, the shuttle bay was deserted.

Jason settled into the pilot's seat while the rest of us strapped in behind him. Jason did a preflight check, then opened the secure channel Howard had set up for us.

"In position," Jason said.

"Ready," Gary said, his voice low.

There was a pause, and we all held our collective breaths as we waited for Howard to do his part, shutting down the sensors that would warn of an unauthorized shuttle launch.

"Go," Howard finally said, the shuttle bay doors opening in front of us.

Jason didn't wait an instant, powering up the shuttle and taking us out before anyone could take action. 

"God speed," Gary said quietly over the comms.

We were approaching the surface, the ghost trees beginning to loom large on our screen, when someone on the bridge crew finally must have finally seen past Howard's fiddling with the sensors and Gary's distraction.

"Discovery Shuttle Beta, you are unauthorized for launch," said a woman's voice I didn't recognize.

We ignored her.

"Discovery Shuttle Beta…" she tried again, before Rob shut off the comms with a stab of his finger.

"That's enough of that," Rob said. He shot me a nervous grin, and then leaned in and kissed me.

Dawn rolled her eyes, and Jason gave a warning cough.

"We're approaching the surface," he said. "So, I'd advise you two to knock that off and prepare to land."

We did as we were told, though not before I gave Rob one last peck on the cheek.

I watched the display in the cockpit as Jason began the final descent, piloting the shuttle through a ring of ghost trees until he brought us to a gentle halt in the same valley we'd landed in before.

I'd have recognized the valley anyway—it rang a bell in my heart and quieted the whispers in my head like nothing else had—but the scorch marks surrounding the tree that I'd touched, that Rob must have pulled me away from, made it unmistakable.

Jason frowned at those scorch marks, then he turned back to me.

"Are you sure about this, Markie?" One thing about Jason, he always came across as serene and confident, but he looked neither of those things just then. In fact, he looked like he was beginning to regret ever having agreed to pilot us to this place.

I closed my eyes once more and reached out to the whispering that had gone calm as soon as we'd started making plans. The voices seemed to reach back, to reassure me.

I opened my eyes, and met Jason's gaze firmly.

"I'm sure, Jay."

To his credit, Jason didn't question me at all after that.

He joined in helping me and Rob get our space suits on, checking our air tanks and locking home gloves and helmets.

"We're here if you need us," Dawn said, standing to one side of the shuttle's airlock.

"Thanks," I told her, so grateful that I had such good friends, friends who were willing to disobey orders, to risk their careers and their lives, simply because I told them I had to do something.

We stepped into the airlock, and then Jason counted down the cycle, his voice sounding evenly in my calm system.

"Three, two, one," he said, and then the door in front of us opened with a hiss.

As we stepped onto the surface, the whispering in my head once again became a clamour, but this time it wasn't frightening, wasn't overwhelming. It felt right.

With Rob holding my hand, I moved toward the same tree I'd touched before, following the scorch marks like the path on a well-worn map. When we were no more than a metre from the tree, Rob pulled to a halt, as if he was unwilling, or unable to go any further.

I turned back to him, and through the visor of his helmet I could see his concerned green eyes. I took both of his hands in mind, wishing more than anything I could feel his skin on mine, and gave what I hoped was an encouraging smile as the voices swirled around me.

"It's going to be okay," I told him.

"It better be," he replied.

"You have to promise me one thing, though." I squeezed his hands tighter. "Don't stop me. No matter what I do."

"Christ, Markie, that's not ominous at all," Rob said.

"Promise, Rob," I insisted.

Rob stared at me for a good minute, all the while the voices grew louder, urging me forward.

"I promise," Rob finally said, and only then did I allow myself to take the last few steps to the tree.

I turned and reached out a gloved hand, hesitated, then touched the tree. The voices surged around me, but I immediately knew it wasn't enough. Hoping Rob was going to keep his promise, I took off one glove of my suit, hearing a faint hiss as my oxygen began to escape from the exposed seam. My hand was less cold than I'd thought it would be; I could feel a comfortable breeze brush my skin.

I touched the tree with my bare hand, surprised to find it warm beneath my hand. With that simple touch, the whispering in my head exploded into a chorus. In an instant, I was me, I was the tree, I was the forest, I was the whole planet.

I threw back my head, looking to where the ghost trees rose above my head, stretching their bleached branches into the purple sky as my breath sounded harshly in my helmet.

I still couldn't understand the language, but I could hear the individual voices now. The sounds weren't a chorus, they were a conversation, an argument. There were questions and answers, there were claims and rebuttals, all channelled around and through me.

One voice rose above the others, and somehow I knew it was the voice of the tree I was touching right now, its voice protecting and soothing, even as my breathing became more laboured as the oxygen I needed slowly bled out of my suit.

I looked back down where my hand rested on the tree's trunk, and the skin seemed to be going paler and paler, until it was nearly as white as the tree itself, like I was becoming as much of a ghost as the trees around me.

I struggled to take another breath, and the argument swirled around me. The language was still impossibly alien, but I began to catch some sense of the meaning, that the argument was about me, about us, about humanity. I closed my eyes and opened my mind to the ghost trees and thought of the best of my species. My shipmates. My family. My friends. Our resilience. Our determination. Our love.

I drew in another breath, and felt the strength leave my legs. I sank to my knees, but kept my palm on the tree, knowing that it was essential to maintain the touch with it. 

Then I heard it. Words I could understand. Words from the trees surrounding me.

_Strangers._

_Invaders._

_Trespassers._

The voice of my tree rose up around and inside me with other words.

_Visitors._

_Guests._

_Friends._

Another breath, and it felt like there was even less oxygen left in my suit. But I couldn't move, couldn't put my glove back on, couldn't go back to the ship. Not yet.

And then, when I felt like I'd never breathe oxygen again, I felt the presence of my tree surround me as it spoke one more word.

_Welcome._

I opened my eyes and looked back up to the sky. As I watched, a bud formed on the branch nearest to me, then burst as a leaf of the palest green unfurled.

The ghost trees weren't ghosts after all.

More buds formed, more leaves opened, leaves of green and red and pale, pale purple, all waving in a breeze I could feel on the skin of my one exposed hand.

_Welcome_, said another voice, and then another tree began to bud and fill out with leaves.

Then the _welcomes_ came fast and furious, from all the trees in the valley, on the continent, on the world, and the sky went from purple to a pale blue I'd only seen in pictures of Old Earth.

I breathed again, a harsh gasping sound, and knew exactly what I had to do.

I'd already unlocked my helmet when I heard Rob yell, "Markie, no!" I didn't answer him, even as I knew everything would work out, would be fine. I could hear Rob's steps running toward me as I pulled off my helmet and took a breath of air that until minutes before couldn't have supported our kind of life. 

Rob reached my side when I was taking my third breath on this planet. The ghost tree's planet. _Our_ planet. 

"This is it," I told Rob as he held my face in his still-gloved hands. "We're home."

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for [halotolerant](https://archiveofourown.org/users/halotolerant) for assuring me this didn't suck, and m. butterfly for her usual bang up assistance with matters of grammar and punctuation.


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